Conrad Arensberg, 86, Dies; Hands-On Anthropologist

By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.

Published: February 16, 1997

Conrad M. Arensberg, a pioneering scholar who helped shift the focus of anthropology from the study of exotic primitive peoples to the examination of complex modern societies, died on Monday at a nursing home in Hazlet, N.J. He was 86 and had been professor of anthropology at Columbia University from 1953 until his retirement in 1980.

His wife, Vivian Garrison Arensberg, said that her husband, who maintained homes in Manhattan and Rumson, N.J., died of respiratory failure after a long illness.

By the time he arrived at Columbia in 1953, Dr. Arensberg had already had a profound effect on anthropology, a field now so abstruse that even Ph.D. candidates have trouble saying exactly what it is.

That is partly because Dr. Arensberg was an influential scholar of such range that even as he strove to transform anthropology into an exact science, his work tended to blur the traditional distinctions between anthropology and sociology, psychology, ethnography, demography and any other discipline he found useful in illuminating human behavior.

It is an indication of the scope of his scholarship that toward the end of his career the man who had conducted a watershed study of Irish society in the 1930's was working primarily with chemists on general systems theory.

A native of Pittsburgh, where his father was a prominent lawyer, Dr. Arensberg graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1931, received his doctorate three years later and had an immediate and lasting impact on anthropology. His doctoral dissertation, published as ''The Irish Countryman'' in 1937, was hailed as a landmark and only partly because it was the first study of a European culture in a field that had previously concentrated on people in loincloths.

What made it an instant classic, one still in use as a textbook 60 years later, was not Dr. Arensberg's specific observations on Irish society but the prescriptions he laid down for making and interpreting those observations with scientific precision.

The study became a model for other community studies, and a demanding model it was, requiring that researchers study a target culture from the inside, making meticulous notes on everything they saw, heard or experienced.

In the Irish study, for example, Dr. Arensberg and his fellow researchers, who had the cooperation of Government officials and the local populace, immersed themselves in the life of County Clare, working side by side with their subjects as they plowed, planted, cut turf, harvested and, when the harvest was in, hoisted a few in celebration -- all, mind, in the interest of science. (Never much of a drinker, Dr. Arensberg later complained about the amount of beer he had to consume.)

His approach helped transform anthropology and opened it up to a flood of later developments, including the study and analysis of industrial organizations and the use of anthropology both to understand and solve an array of social problems.

Dr. Arensberg, who helped found the Society of Applied Anthropology, wrote widely and diversely in his expanding field, often in collaboration. In a 1942 book, ''Measuring Human Relations,'' for example, he and Eric Chappele turned their attention to nonverbal behavior, or as Dr. Arensberg liked to put it, ''who does what to whom in what order.''

And in 1957, after making modern societies the focus of anthropology, he and Karl Polanyi brought the work full circle by analyzing economies of ancient empires and comparing them to modern market economies.

For all the impact of his writings and theories, Dr. Arensberg's most significant contribution to anthropology may have been as a teacher. Many of the Ph.D.'s he turned out at Columbia became significant figures in the field.

A man of enormous erudition whose 1980 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association was titled, ''Cultural Holism through Interactional Systems,'' Dr. Arensberg, who worked on the Joint Anthropology Program at Teachers College at Columbia University after his retirement, could speak authoritatively on a broad spectrum of subjects.

Curiously, Dr. Arensberg, who had a distinct stammer when speaking English, had none when he was speaking another language, which may help explain why he learned to speak a dozen languages fluently and acquired a working knowledge of so many others that the only time he had to resort to English when ordering a foreign cuisine, his wife recalled the other day, was when he ate at a Thai restaurant.

In addition to his wife, Dr. Arensberg is survived by three children from a previous marriage, Emily Barton of San Jose, Calif., Margaret Olson of McMinnville, Ore., and Cornelius, of Tampa, Fla.; a brother, Charles, of Pittsburgh, and two granddaughters.